Taking stock – JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, is still slaughtering the Amazon

Globally, JBS is the biggest cog in the destructive industrial meat sector.13 So big is it that its operations have been estimated to produce around half the annual carbon emissions of fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil, Shell or BP.14

The scale of JBS’s environmental and social destruction became a global scandal in 2009, when Greenpeace International published Slaughtering the Amazon.15 The investigation that report laid out exposed how the biggest names in the Brazilian cattle industry – including JBS, then accounting for 10% of global beef production – were linked to hundreds of ranches operating in the Amazon, including some associated with recent and illegal deforestation and modern-day slavery. The report revealed how ‘criminal or “dirty” supplies of cattle are “laundered” through the supply chain to an unwitting global market.’16 In the months following its publication, JBS and the three other major processors in the Brazilian cattle sector signed the G4 Cattle Agreement, an undertaking to end the purchase of cattle whose production is linked to Amazon deforestation, slave labour or the illegal occupation of Indigenous lands based on the demands made in the report. The agreement included a commitment to ensure fully transparent monitoring, verification and reporting of the companies’ entire supply chains (including indirect suppliers) within two years.17

Eleven years on, JBS is still slaughtering the Amazon. It and its network of subsidiaries have been repeatedly linked to suppliers found to be engaging in illegal deforestation in the region18 and

operating illegally on protected Indigenous lands.19 Its suppliers have also been implicated in modern-day slavery20 and its slaughterhouses linked to unacceptable working conditions,21 mass outbreaks of Covid-1922 and salmonella-tainted chicken exports.23

JBS and members of the Batista family – the company’s principal shareholders (via holding company J&F Investimentos) and senior executives – are notorious for their historic systematic bribing of Brazilian politicians and public servants.24

Despite its public claims of openness – and its decadeold commitment through the G4 Cattle Agreement – JBS is backsliding on transparency measures for its cattle supply chains.25 Moreover, a recent investigation reports that JBS is not merely turning a blind eye to its suppliers’ violations but has been directly implicated in transporting deforestation-linked cattle to one of its own direct suppliers.26

It is clear that JBS’s business model is incompatible with the environmental emergency we are facing. According to Trase data, as of 2017 (the most recent year for which data are readily available), approximately 30% of its beef exports from Brazil came from the Amazon.27 Yet despite JBS’s ongoing failure to map out its supply chain with all the risks that entails, and continued reports of its links to deforestation and human rights abuses, the company’s global exports from Brazil are booming – JBS saw an increase in trade volume from Brazil of 40% between 2017 and 201928 and was responsible for around a third of Brazil’s beef exports in 2019.29